1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to pagers, and more particularly, relates to a method of indicating the location of a lost or misplaced paging receiver and its owner's telephone number by generating an alarm and concurrently displaying the telephone number of the original owner upon receipt of an input predetermined special code.
2. Related Art
Conventional paging systems, which come in various levels of sophistication, are personal message receiving devices which monitor a certain broadcast channel used by paging networks to alert or send information to specific subscriber units known as pagers. Exemplary configurations are disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,381,132 for Method Of Displaying Self-Address Data In A Pager Receiver issued to Yun and U.S. Pat. No. 5,475,380 for Time Alarm Method Of A Radio Paging Receiver issued to Shim, both of which are assigned to the same assignee of the present invention. Each subscriber pager has an individual identification ID, i.e., cap-code stored in the pager. All of the pagers in an area monitor broadcast messages from a base station including a central transmitter. Each message is intended for a particular pager and has that pager's ID associated with the message. Thus, pagers in a particular service area all monitor a certain channel, i.e., frequency for broadcasts from the pager system transmitter looking for its ID. When the ID is present, that is when the ID is broadcast by the central transmitter, the message associated with the ID, which typically follows the ID, is acted upon by the pager.
Typically paging systems also have a variety of alarm such as disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 4,918,438, for Paging Receiver Having Audible And Vibrator Annunciating Means issued to Yamasaki, U.S. Pat. No. 5,463,368 for Method Of Setting An Inaudible Alert Mode In A Radio Pager issued to Tsunoda et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,499,020 for Data Display Radio Pager issued to Motohashi et al.
As the radio pager becomes increasing popular for business and personal communications, however, the chance of misplacement and lost is substantially greater. When a pager is missing, its finder who is not informed of the owner of the pager generally does not return the lost or misplaced pager to its original owner. This is usually because it is difficult to verify the identity of the original owner of the lost or misplaced pager. In some cases, a label can be attached to the pager so as to provide information of the pager's owner such as a telephone number or address, but the label can easily be pealed off the pager. However, most users do not attach such a label to their pagers because the label can spoil the appearance of the pager. Moreover, even if the lost or misplaced pager has a label bearing the owner's telephone number, the finder possibly will not be motivated to return the lost or misplaced pager to the original owner if the pager bears no information pertaining to the original owner. In addition to this, if a pager is lost or misplaced in the proximity of the original owner, the location of such a pager can be alerted to the original owner with an audible call tone.